“Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar” by Lionel Royer, 1899

Passé présomptif

PETER THONEMANN

The first date in English History, according to 1066 and All That, is 55

BC, the year of Julius Caesar’s memorable landing at Thanet. “The

Ancient Britons”, Sellar and Yeatman remind us, “were by no means

savages before the Conquest, and had already made great strides in

civilisation, e.g. they buried each other in long round wheelbarrows

(agriculture) and burnt each other alive (religion) under the guidance of

even older Britons called Druids or Eisteddfods . . . . The Roman

Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only

natives at that time.”

Except for a small minority of mistletoe-wielding henge-huggers, pre-

conquest Britain has never really impinged much on the British national

imagination. In schools, Our Island Story starts with Roman Britain,

which is still basically seen as a Good Thing. There are no public statues

of Caratacus, leader of the native British resistance to the Roman

invasion under Claudius in AD 43; even Boudicca, who led a later revolt

of the Iceni against Rome (AD 60), has never really taken off as a

national folk hero on the scale of King Arthur, Elizabeth I, or Winston

Churchill. (Just try to think of a famous saying by Boudicca.)

In France, things are different. Ever since the Revolution, the idea of a

deep and mystical connection with “our ancestors the Gauls” has been

central to French national identity. It is telling that Asterix, the plucky

Gallic resistance fighter against the Roman occupier, has no British

equivalent. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century British imperialists could

cheerfully identify with Rome’s civilizing mission in barbarian lands; the

French, faced with the problem of incorporating three traumatic foreign

occupations into their national self-perception (1870, 1914, 1940), have

tended to identify with the native Gaulish Résistance against Rome.

The first date in French history, accordingly, is 52 BC, the year of the

great “national” revolt of the Gauls against Rome. Southern Gaul

(modern Provence and Languedoc) had been a Roman province since the

late second century BC; through a series of brutal campaigns in the early

50s BC, Julius Caesar had brought most of the rest of Gaul into the

Roman orbit. Early in 52 BC, Vercingetorix, the chieftain of a powerful

Celtic tribe in the Auvergne (the Arverni), assembled a vast alliance of

Gallic peoples to drive the Romans out of central Gaul. Caesar crushed

the rebellion with extraordinary savagery: his siege of Avaricum (near

Bourges) ended with the slaughter of all but 800 of the town’s 40,000

inhabitants. Vercingetorix himself surrendered to Caesar after the fall of

Alesia (Mont-Auxois, near Alise-Sainte-Reine) in September 52 BC, and

was later executed in Rome.

Vercingetorix’s doomed revolt against Rome has made him a particularly

potent French culture hero, co-opted and invoked by everyone from

Marshal Pétain (“self-sacrifice for the greater glory of France”) to

Charles de Gaulle (“the first résistant of our race”), and from Napoleon

III (who erected a huge statue of Vercingetorix at Alesia, with the face

modelled on his own) to Jean-Marie Le Pen (“Gaul for the Gauls”). It is

no surprise that Vercingetorix is the first pre-modern “Frenchman” to be

admitted to Gallimard’s prestigious NRF Biographies series.

This handsome series of volumes (forty-nine so far) is a kind of literary

Panthéon of French national luminaries: Vercingetorix’s immediate

predecessors in the series were Montaigne, Louis Aragon, François

Mitterrand and Bonaparte. The occasional foreigner has crept in (Mao,

Fellini, Nabokov), as have a tiny handful of women (three out of forty-

nine), but on the whole, the NRF Biographical Club is very serious, very

male, and very French indeed.

Jean-Louis Brunaux has written a string of popular books on the history

and culture of pre-Roman Gaul, and his Vercingétorix is a work of

passion and grandeur: it will sell by the thousands. The trouble is that

Vercingetorix is about the most unsuitable subject for a biography one

could possibly imagine. Our evidence for his life consists, in its entirety,

of the following: (1) Caesar’s Gallic Wars Book VII, covering military

events of the year 52 BC from the Roman perspective, with a couple of

patently fictitious “speeches by Vercingetorix”; (2) a few pages of

Cassius Dio’s Roman History, written some 250 years later, which

recapitulate Caesar’s account with some additional tabloid flourishes; (3)

gold coins bearing the name VERCINGETORIXS, apparently struck

during the revolt. Of Vercingetorix’s life before 52 BC we know literally

not a thing.

Don’t despair! Are you aiming to write a “serious” 300-page biography

of someone about whom we basically know nothing – Wat Tyler,

Nefertiti, or Pontius Pilate? Easy: it is all just a matter of careful

manipulation of narrative past tenses. When you have genuine evidence

for something, you can use the passé simple (and a footnote): “After his

defeat at Alesia, Vercingetorix threw his arms down at Caesar’s feet

(Caesar, Gallic Wars VII 89.4)”. When the evidence gives out, but there

is space for legitimate speculation and analogy, you can use the passé

spéculatif: “Caesar may well have required Vercingetorix to pass beneath

a yoke of spears, the standard Roman military ritual for humiliating

defeated enemies”.

But your secret weapon is what we might call the passé présomptif, a

special linguistic tool only used by struggling historical biographers. We

have not a scrap of evidence for Vercingetorix’s childhood, or indeed

any aspect of his life before the revolt of 52 BC; but presumably he came

from a chieftain’s family, presumably among the Arverni,

who presumably lived as other elite members of the Arverni did in the

first century BC – and suddenly your book starts writing itself:

The family of Vercingetorix would have owned [possédait] several landholdings,

and at least one large villa – in fact a huge agricultural manor – at the heart of his

estates . . . the young Vercingetorix would have come to know [connaissait] the

skill, even the genius of the artisans working on his family estate: the blacksmiths

who could forge the most fearsome swords and wheel- and barrel-bands; the

potters who, in the plain of Limagne, produced the most beautiful and fascinating

ceramics, painted with strange and fabulous animals; the weavers who created

coloured fabrics with geometric designs, sometimes embroidered with gold and

silver filigree. And so it was that through the first twelve years of his life, this

young boy gained experience of a lifestyle, as the Gauls conceived it, intimately

linked to nature, and of the people with whom a Gallic chieftain had to deal.

Statements framed in the passé présomptif have several useful

characteristics. First, they are not subject to refutation. (Try showing that

Vercingetorix wasn’t familiar with late La Tène ceramic ware with

painted zoomorphic decoration, or that he wasn’t reared to a “lifestyle

intimately linked to nature”.) Second, once you have the knack,

statements in the passé présomptif can be strung together into 156 pages

of vivid and colourful biography (Brunaux’s first seven chapters,

covering Vercingetorix’s life before 52 BC) without breaking sweat. Pick

literally any event or object known from first-century BC Gaul; voilà,

you have something that Vercingetorix “would have eaten”, “must have

seen”, “could have known about”. Third, and most insidious, it allows a

biographer to take the moral high ground. Earlier historians, with their

tedious insistence on sticking to the evidence-based passé simple, have

based their picture of Vercingetorix on the one-sided account of his

enemy Caesar; I have got beyond this chauvinistic Roman perspective to

show what his life would really have been like.

As a specimen of biography in the passé présomptif,

Brunaux’s Vercingétorix is as good as they come. His narrative of the

great revolt of 52 BC is swift and exciting, and he does full justice to

Caesar’s terrible sieges at Avaricum, Gergovia and Alesia, though the

absence of a map does make the campaign unnecessarily hard to follow.

But for all its thunderous cadences, Vercingétorix is a deeply problematic

book. When its protagonist surrenders to Caesar at Alesia, Cassius Dio

claims (probably spuriously) that the defeated chief hoped to be

pardoned, “since he had once been on friendly terms with Caesar”. On

the basis of this phrase alone, Brunaux includes no fewer than twenty-

four pages on the years Vercingetorix “must have spent” as a hostage in

Caesar’s camp between 58 and 56 BC. It gets worse: Brunaux

reconstructs a year-by-year chronology of their friendship – Caesar was

first attracted to Vercingetorix in 58 BC, but their “deep and intimate”

friendship only began in 57 BC, and so on. We are in the same territory

as Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Eagle of the Ninth or Robert Graves’s I,

Claudius.

This kind of thing can be done well. In 2005, Richard Hingley and

Christina Unwin wrote a first-rate biography of Boudicca (Boudica: Iron

Age warrior queen), about whom we know even less than we do about

Vercingetorix. Hingley and Unwin offer not a single example of

the passé présomptif: they include one short chapter summarizing what

we actually know about Boudicca, two chapters on the material culture

of Boudicca’s Britain, and five rich and absorbing chapters on her

afterlives in the British imagination, from the Elizabethan period to the

present. A book of this kind about Vercingetorix, showing how he has

been used and abused by everyone from Napoleon III to Le Pen, would

be a terrific thing to have. But Brunaux’s Vercingétorix, I fear, is not that

book.